A Trini Christmas: Advent #2
Welcome to the second in a series of short posts about Christmas and eating in film and literature. I will be sending these out every few days, a few will be paywalled, and you should think of this series as a kind of literary advent calendar. Listen to this as you read the piece below.
Whenever I see a recipe for Black Cake, I think of Betty Chambers, who babysat Laurie Colwin’s little daughter three mornings a week. Chambers came from the island of St Vincent and introduced Colwin to her version of this traditional West Indian fruit cake. “There is fruitcake, and there is Black Cake, which is to fruitcake what the Brahms piano quartets are to Muzak. … Black Cake, like truffles and vintage Burgundy, is deep, complicated, and intense. It has taste and aftertaste. It demands to be eaten in a slow, meditative way. The texture is complicated too—dense and light at the same time,” Colwin writes. “It is not an acquired taste. One bite is all it takes.”
My opinion? Black Cake is the greatest fruit cake of all. Sit down at a table on a Caribbean island* and you will be served a local take. The dried fruit might vary, the alcohol probably will (although rum seems to be a given). It is a deeply personal cake. It says home no matter where you’ve laid your hat.
Lynn Joseph’s An Island Christmas is part of the ‘own voice’ series of books, written by an author who was born and raised in the Caribbean. Joseph’s book is set in Trinidad on the first day of the Christmas holidays. Rosie, her Mama and Tantie are baking Black Cake:
“Then I line de cake pans with wax paper and watch as Tantie swishes her mighty spoon round and round each bowl”…. “It’s dark outside now, but de kitchen glowing like Christmas.”
Rosie is sent by her mother to pick the red petals from hibiscus bushes which are dried and used to make the traditional sorrel drink. They make soursop ie cream and aloo pies. Their tree is a guava branch painted with white shoe polish to simulate snow and on Christmas Eve, the family goes paranging.
The Black Cake calls for burned sugar essence which is, essentially, melted and browned sugar made the way you would for caramel but thinned down with water at the end of the process. Nigella Lawson uses molasses in her recipe which is lightly adapted from the recipe given to Colwin by Betty Chambers. The fruit in Black Cake is soaked in an insane amount of alcohol and left to steep for months. (This recipe uses cherry brandy, rum, and angostura bitters.) Find Nigella’s recipe tribute to Colwin in How To Be a Domestic Goddess (an ironic title that I feel Colwin would have adored).
*Countries like Guyana that are on the mainland of South America also bake Black Cakes. Guyana, Belize, Suriname, and French Guiana can be classified as part of the Caribbean.
Jillian Atkinson’s recipe for Black Cake Cookies turns the traditional “dense, pudding-like cake into a crispy-edged cookie with a chewy pool in the center and delightful hints of nutmeg and cinnamon.” I am desperate to bake them.
A Parang Soca playlist for Christmas.
Black Cake via the Washington Post (£)
Susan James’s Black Cake via NPR.
I’m really looking forward to reading Charmaine Wilkerson’s novel, Black Cake, out early 2022.
This Guyanese version is made with blackberry wine.
“Black cake reflects the British presence in the Caribbean. The brown sugar, molasses and rum are reminders that it was the quest for sugar, and the slave labor that harvested it, that kept British colonialists in the islands,” writes Julia Moskin in the NYT (£).
love this! i've always wanted to try making black cake...this is great motivation!